Los Angeles Medical Team Performs California’s First Auditory Brainstem Implant Surgery on Toddler at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Part of Only NIH-funded Study of Device’s Safety and Use In Young Children

3-year-old Canadian boy hears for first time after device activation at Keck Medicine of USC

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Six weeks after surgery at CHLA, Auguste Majkowski, 3, had his device activated at Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California and he responded to sound.

Children's Hospital Los Angeles surgical team performs auditory brainstem implant surgery on Auguste Majkowski, the first on a child in California.

Newswise — LOS ANGELES (July 22, 2014)— A Los Angeles team of scientists and surgeons from Keck Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and Huntington Medical Research Institutes (HMRI) reported that sound registered in the brain of a deaf Canadian boy for the first time after doctors activated a hearing device that had been surgically implanted in his brainstem. Auguste Majkowski, 3, is the first child in the United States to undergo an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) surgery in a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved trial supported by a National Institutes of Health (NIH) clinical trial grant. On June 12, six weeks after surgery at CHLA, the device was activated with positive results at the Department of Otolaryngology – Head & Neck Surgery clinic at Keck Medicine of USC. “It was magical,” said Sophie Gareau, Auguste’s mother. “He’s a tough kid.”

Auguste’s surgery, device activation and future behavioral study are part of a five-year clinical trial in which 10 devices will be implanted in deaf children under the age of 5 and studied over the course of three years. The Los Angeles study, co-led by audiologist Laurie Eisenberg, Ph.D., and surgeon Eric Wilkinson, M.D., is the only in the United States to be supported by the NIH.

“Our Los Angeles-based team has been at the forefront of ABI technology development since it came into use in the late 1970s for adults, so it is especially gratifying to help break the ‘sound barrier’ once again; this time, for children who previously could not hear,” said Eisenberg, a Keck School of Medicine of USC otolaryngology professor. “Surgeons outside the United States have been doing ABI surgeries in children for 10 years, but there has never been a formal safety or feasibility study under regulatory oversight. Our team is writing the manuals for all the procedures for this technology, and we have a top-notch multidisciplinary team in place to carry out the research.”

The surgical team that performed the operation at Children’s Hospital included Wilkinson, HMRI research scientist and neurotologist at House Clinic; HMRI research scientist and House Clinic neurosurgeon Marc Schwartz, M.D., and pediatric neurosurgeon Mark D. Krieger, M.D., Billy and Audrey Wilder chair, Division of Neurosurgery at CHLA. Attending the surgery was also Vittorio Colletti, M.D., of the University of Verona Hospital, Verona, Italy, who has performed the most ABI surgeries on children overseas and is a collaborator on the study.

The study’s goal is to establish safety and efficacy protocols for the surgery and subsequent behavioral mapping procedures that doctors in the United States can then later utilize once the surgery is approved for children in the U.S.

“Hundreds of children in the U.S. can benefit from ABI surgery,” said Krieger, who also is associate professor of clinical neurosurgery at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. “These children would otherwise never hear or develop verbal speech in their lives.”

Auguste was the first child accepted into the Los Angeles study. Thirty-six days after the May 6 surgery at CHLA, his parents watched as audiologists Margaret Winter, M.S. and Jamie Glater, Au.D., from the USC Center for Childhood Communication activated the device implanted in Auguste’s brainstem. When Winter delivered tiny pulses of electic current to the electrodes in his brain, the toddler lifted his head indicating he heard a sound.

Auguste has been deaf since birth. At 22 months, he underwent a bilateral cochlear implant, which uses electrodes to stimulate auditory nerves, but the device didn’t help him hear because he doesn’t have a cochlear, or hearing, nerve. Auguste traveled with his parents, Sophie and Christophe, from Montreal to Los Angeles to participate in the clinical trial. The NIH grant covers the costs of the device, procedure and subsequent testing. To qualify for participation, patients must show that standard treatment such as hearing aids and cochlear implants have been ineffective.

During the six-hour surgery in May, doctors made an incision by Auguste’s right ear and removed his right cochlear implant before implanting the ABI device on his brainstem. The ABI device has external and internal parts. The external parts, which consist of a processor with a microphone and transmitter, transform sound into electrical signals and transmit the signals to an internal receiver that is part of the electrode array. The electrode array is placed on the cochlear nucleus of the brainstem. The procedure is considered revolutionary because it stimulates neurons directly at the human brainstem, bypassing the inner ear entirely.

The young children who had ABIs implanted outside the United States now have the potential to understand speech, but, in the United States, the device is FDA-approved for use only in patients 12 years or older with neurofibromatosis type II, an inherited disease that causes a non-malignant brain tumor on the hearing nerve. It has shown limited effectiveness in adults, however, and scientists believe that the device would be more effective in young children, when their brains are more adaptable. The clinical trial will attempt to prove that this surgery is safe in young children and allow researchers to study how the brain develops over time and how it learns to hear sound and develop speech.

“The children in this study are under 5 years of age,” says Keck School of Medicine of USC Professor Robert V. Shannon, Ph.D., an investigator for the trial and leading scientist in the development of ABI technology since 1989. “When a child is born, their ear is hard-wired for sound but the brain has to learn how to perceive sound and speech from the information coming up the hearing pathway. If the ear is not providing sound information to the brain, the hearing part of the brain doesn’t develop properly. The ABI provides sound to these pathways so they grow and develop with the child.”

After the devices are implanted, the Los Angeles-based researchers will study how the brain develops over time as it incorporates sound and speech. If the clinical trial is successful, children across the United States will be able to benefit from surgical and audiology techniques and safety and efficacy protocols developed in the study.

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About Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Children's Hospital Los Angeles has been named the best children’s hospital on the West Coast and among the top five in the nation for clinical excellence with its selection to the prestigious U.S. News & World Report Honor Roll. Children’s Hospital is home to The Saban Research Institute, one of the largest and most productive pediatric research facilities in the United States. Children’s Hospital is also one of America's premier teaching hospitals through its affiliation since 1932 with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. For more information, visit CHLA.org. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, or visit our blog: WeTreatKidsBetter.org. About Keck Medicine Of USCKeck Medicine of USC is the University of Southern California's medical enterprise, one of only two university-based medical systems in the Los Angeles area. Encompassing academic, research and clinical excellence, the medical system attracts internationally renowned experts who teach and practice at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, the region’s first medical school; includes the renowned USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center, one of the first comprehensive cancer centers established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States; has a medical faculty practice, the USC Care Medical Group; operates the Keck Medical Center of USC, which includes two acute care hospitals: 401-licensed bed Keck Hospital of USC and 60-licensed bed USC Norris Cancer Hospital; and owns USC Verdugo Hills Hospital, a 158-licensed bed community hospital. It also includes more than 40 outpatient facilities, some at affiliated hospitals, in Los Angeles, Orange, Kern, Tulare and Ventura counties. For more information, go to www.keckmedicine.org/beyond